In the famous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court announced a constitutional right of privacy.

The court admitted in the decision that, “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.”

So where did this right come from? It has roots in The Fourth Amendment declaration that, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

While most people only think of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights when they consider this, there is another aspect: a person’s freedom to private association.

In 1956, the state of Alabama, through its attorney general, attempted to stop the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from conducting business in that state. The attorney general claimed the NAACP was a foreign agent — i.e., a non-Alabama organization — incorporated in another state — in this instance New York.

The NAACP hadn’t been registered in Alabama, so the attorney general demanded that the organization be registered and pay a fine for its violation of state law. The NAACP agreed to comply and even to pay the fine. But then the attorney general demanded that the NAACP provide the state with membership and donor lists, which the NAACP refused to do, for obvious reasons. The state government was likely to turn the membership and donor lists over to the Ku Klux Klan and other groups hostile to the NAACP.

The NAACP sued and the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the NAACP. The court reasoned that there exists a freedom of association embedded in the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Writing for the court, Justice John Marshall Harlan said, “Freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.”

Thus, a zone of privacy was established disallowing the intrusion of the state in a person’s identity and association decisions.

That zone of privacy has since been enlarged to a full-fledged constitutional right.

When a branch of the IRS, under the direction of Lois Lerner, insisted that certain conservative organizations must divulge their membership and donor lists in applications to the IRS, I was reminded of the NAACP case. We now know that the IRS had been flagrantly violating the 50-year-old NAACP ruling.

Now the IRS has publicly acknowledged that it will no longer demand donor lists and amounts from some non-for-profit organizations. The Treasury Department and IRS jointly announced July 16 “that the IRS will no longer require certain tax-exempt organizations to file personally identifiable information about their donors as part of their annual return.”

This was not done through an act of Congress nor from a court, but was announced as a policy decision from the department itself. It is one of the few instances in which a government bureaucracy announced it was giving up some power.

Given the legacy of abuse by politicized government bureaus of membership and donor information at least as far back as NAACP v. Alabama, this policy announcement is a welcome change.